Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday August 10, 2017 @02:35PM
from the his-views dept.

An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report, in which the recently fired employee has been interviewed: James Damore, who until Monday worked as an engineer on video and image search at Alphabet's Mountain View, California, headquarters, said he initially shared the 3,300-word memo internally a month ago. But it was only after the memo went viral that company leaders banded together to make him an outcast, he said on Bloomberg TV. When he initially circulated the memo, "no one high up ever came to me and said, 'No, don't do this,' even though there were many people who looked at it," Damore said. "It was only after it got viral that upper management started shaming me and eventually firing me." The memo, which was leaked to the public over the weekend, argues that conservative viewpoints are suppressed at Google and that biological differences between men and women explain in part why so few women work in software engineering. Even if someone in Google management had agreed with some of the arguments put forth in his piece, they wouldn't have felt safe speaking up, he said. "There was a concerted effort among upper management to have a very clear signal that what I did was harmful and wrong and didn't stand for Google," Damore said. "It would be career suicide for any executives or directors to support me."

I admire the guy for standing up for the empirical truth or what he believes to be the empirical truth; probably knowing the potential consequences to his career.

Frankly; I hope he takes them all to court -- fights it out to the end and wins. I also hope he finds people to support him in this crusade and help prevent total ruin in his life caused by the brainless authoritarian dogmatic left.

I'd put money on it. Either he's socially absolutely brain-dead (possibly) or he had a plan that he understood the possible consequences of. Most people who want to stay in an organization understand that becoming a lightning rod for criticism is not a good idea. Don't poke the sleeping management bear is a pretty well understood rule.That said, the comment that it would have been career suicide to support some of his views is laughable. Career at Google, maybe. But not career outside of Google. Ple

I kind of wonder if he intended to get fired and the sue... It wasn't exactly hard to predict. He could have published it anonymously, but didn't. It just seems like he wanted to martyr himself.

I listened to an interview with the guy, and doubt it. Sure, you and I reading/. would know what was coming, but a whole lot of people don't pay any attention to the political world until something bad happens to them. Not a new phenomenon, and certainly not something new where a bookworm gets surprised by politics.

IAAL, though not an employment lawyer and not a California lawyer. I think he has a case- it will survive a motion to dismiss and possibly even summary judgment- but not necessarily one he will win if it goes to final merits. Google is likely to fight hard on this one, but they also understood a lawsuit was the likely outcome of firing him, and likely decided it was worth the cost.

The scenario where Google could have offered Damore a big severance package was not really an option, assuming Google wants to maintain internal morale. Once the PC authoritarians heard about any severance

That's why they offer it with a nondisclosure agreement, so no one finds out about it.

I read the memo, unlike you. IANAL, but believe he's got a pretty solid case. The Stalinist tactics being used by many are being illuminated.

Unlike you, I have not read the memo, and I am also not a lawyer.

However, I do know the very basic definition of Stalinism, and this isn't it. In a Stalinist state, the government oppresses people and regulates speech, and it also owns and controls the means of production. Google is not the government, therefore it's quite impossible for anything here to be compared

In the way of Stalinism, yes. I mean, it's possible for other institutions to try to act authoritarian, but their power is quite limited, because they're not a government (with some exceptions, such as "company towns" in the US back in the 1800s where the company owned everything and had hired thugs to keep people in line). A company can't really be authoritarian: if you don't like the way they're treating you, you're free to leave at any time, and there's plenty of worker-protection laws on the books these days.

The term refers to the method of enforcing and reinforcing an ideology.

Right, and the only institution that has the power of enforcement in modern times is a government. A church may have an ideology, but they can't force you to donate or prevent you from leaving. And companies obviously do have ideologies, but again basic employment law prevails and you can quit any time.

but if I said Nazi you would claim I was trying to Godwin the discussion.

No, I wouldn't. I never say that, because it's an utterly stupid thing to say. If a comparison with Nazis is warranted, then by all means make it. That whole "Godwinning the discussion" thing is such bullshit. "I win! I win! You brought up Nazis! I win!" -- something only a complete idiot would say, but I have seen it here from time to time.

But the Nazi comparison makes little sense here again because we're talking about a company; companies in the US may have too much political power IMO, but they don't have any power to use violence against employees they don't like. The Nazis had thugs (like the SA (stormtroopers)) that would use violence against political opponents, and they got control of the government.

To quote de Bruyn et al (first reference on status and sex, above): high status predicts more mating opportunities and, thus, increased reproductive success. âoeThis is true for human adults in many cultures, both âmodernâ(TM) as well as âprimitiveâ(TM) (Betzig, 1986). In fact, this theory seems to be confirmed for non-human primates (Cheney, 1983; Cowlishaw and Dunbar, 1991; Dewsbury, 1982; Gray, 1985; Maslow, 1936) and other animals from widely differing ecologies (Ellis, 1995) such as squirrels (Farentinos, 1972), cockerels (Kratzer and Craig, 1980), and cockroaches (Breed, Smith, and Gall, 1980).â Status also increases female reproductive success, via a different pathway: âoeFor females, it is generally argued that dominance is not necessarily a path to more copulations, as it is for males. It appears that important benefits bestowed upon dominant women are access to resources and less harassment from rivals (Campbell, 2002). Thus, dominant females tend to have higher offspring survival rates, at least among simians (Pusey, Williams, and Goodall, 1997); thus, dominance among females also appears to be linked to reproductive success.â

But at Google the gender gap in tech roles is 80-20, according to their own self-reporting. There's something more systemic going on than the subtle psychological differences between men and women.

Perhaps. This woman [bloomberg.com] argues that the differences are self-exaggerating, that fields which fewer women are interested in pursuing tend to be male-dominated, which makes them even less attractive to women, which makes them more male-dominated, in a cycle which leads ultimately to a situation where only the women most devoted to the field stay in it.

Read the article, it's well-written and insightful.

This accords as well with the experience of Scandinavian countries who have bent over backwards to ensure not just absolute equality of opportunity, but that everyone has the opportunity to pursue whatever course of education they like and have the talent for. And what they've seen is that rather than fields which are historically dominated by one gender or another equalizing, the ratio has become even more extreme. In Norway, for example, engineering fields tend not to be 50/50, or even 80/20, but 90/10. It appears that when you free people to pursue their own interests, the gender gap increases.

It's Google's money though, so they can do with it what they want. Companies invest far more money than that in things that don't pan out all the time, so I'm not sure why this should be given any special consideration.

Everyone knows, rule by witchhunt creates the best workplace and products.

People look back on history condescendingly about the Salem Witch Trials and "how could people be so ignorant." Then you look at what's happening right now. There's some biological / social urge to "Weed out the aliens/different/toxic entity" within an organization.

There's no difference. There's no moral high ground. The same justifications only a different set of victims this time around. History repeats.

The hippies that used to protest their clean cut bosses are now the ones crushing the minorities. History repeats.

Well, there's plenty calling for his life to be ruined and ensure he can never provide a living for himself, so they're definitely figuratively calling to burn him at the stake. But lets be honest with ourselves, this is the modern internet, I'd be shocked if there weren't a fair few number of people calling to literally burn him at the stake, or kill him in one way or another.

Given how the times in general have mellowed, you can't expect the same amount of hurt even in witch trials. Just like a fifteen year old boy in London won't get executed for a loaf of stolen bread anymore.

So if you wrote a memo saying "I believe men and women are equal" and your company execs disagreed with you and fired you for writing that memo, you would be totally okay with that? You wouldn't raise a stink, you wouldn't talk to the media, you would just go away quietly and look for another job?

He created a hostile work environment in much the same way someone who admits they're a Red Sox fan in a Yankee friendly bar. And not even someone wearing a Sox hat or jersey, just a guy having a personal conversation in a corner booth being asked what his favorite team is.

He wrote a post in a internal forum used to discuss ways to make the company better that discussed issues with their hiring practices and methodology being used to up certain groups numbers. He proposed solutions that he believed would better attain the stated hiring goals and that he also believed would be more natural and both increase attractiveness to the target group but also be more fair to everyone else at the company.

In response to this memo being reposted outside of the forum (and not by him) and then terribly mischaracterized by people that made no attempt to understand it he was physically threatened and several employees made public statements about wishing him harm and/or wanting him fired.

The ONLY people making Google a hostile work environment are the people overreacting to what was generally a very neutral, fairly well researched memo. I'm sure most of the people at Google don't even care and there are probably a significant number that agree with him but seeing how the extreme PCers are acting about this they would never speak up and dare have the mobs wrath turned on them (which also happened to be a point he made).

In the statement, "I believe men and women are equal" there is no discrimination going on. It is like saying, "I believe red and blue are both colors." It has no weight at all when viewed from the perspective of state anti-discrimination laws and the requirement that employers provide a non-hostile workplace.

If you disagree with the existence of anti-discrimination laws as they relate to employment in the State of California, you should do th

He said he was aware of illegal hiring practices at Google (see page 6, footnote 6 [vice.com]), so them firing him days later could be viewed as retaliation against a whistleblower, which is an illegal reason to fire someone in California.

Also, he identified himself on page 2 as a "classical liberal [wikipedia.org]" (including with that link), not a conservative.

Of course he's saying they shamed and smeared him, to do otherwise would be to admit they had good reasons to fire him.

The problem is that he basically accused his bosses of being incompetent thought-controlling tyrants, and then let his accusations get into the media. He put them in the difficult position of either having to admit his accusations were correct or having to fire him. If what he wrote was true, they weren't going to the first one and if what he wrote was false, they definitely weren't going

When it went viral the big G had to fire him because not doing so would have made them look bad in the public eye.
I wouldn't really care much if it had been an extremist and sexist piece but it isn't.
You may or may not agree but it's a reasoned document.
Alas, it doesn't really matter, what mattered is that it got viral and many piece of news about it made it look much worse than it really is, they said it said things that are just not there. Many people who read this terrible reporting was outraged (as I would be if it really was what they claim it is) and then the man was lost.
It's sad we've gotten so uptight about certain topics that merely suggesting something different to the accepted narrative can get you fired.

You cannot expect to use biology as your shield for supporting inequality without expecting a severe backlash. This country is founded on equality. If you want something else, find a different geography that espouses your views.

Let's be real.

We will never achieve perfect diversity.

But we are guaranteed equal opportunity under the constitution. Equal opportunity is not conditional on biology or "suited for" conclusions. The measuring stick is independent of biology. Unfortunately in these jobs, the pe

I'm actually pretty disappointed that this didn't trigger an avalanche of support from within Google. I'd like to think that if I worked there, I'd type up my own suicide note in support of him and circulate that internally.

Discovery will turn up the conspiracy by nutcases, and their mgmt overlords.

Some lawyer will have a complete field day with this, before moonwalking his way into a tens of million dollar payout. If it even gets to that level, since Google mgmt knows they are politically and morally corrupt. They'll pay out to keep this secret. This will be Gamergate II, only better, and waged in a courtroom and via depositions.

I'm wondering how many SJWs in the media they've been conspiring with to slime this guy. They

Honestly, he's saying exactly the opposite. "When he initially circulated the memo, 'no one high up ever came to me and said, 'No, don't do this,' even though there were many people who looked at it."

There's a lot of talk about free speech, but it sounds like Google was okay with him expressing his opinion, and didn't try to silence (or shame) their engineer in any way whatsoever -- for at least a month, up until it became public. If we're going to really listen to what the engineer is saying, then Google actually is tolerant of different viewpoints under most circumstances.

At-will employment refresher - IF YOU ARE A DICK WHO SAYS CUNTY THINGS, YOU MIGHT GET FUCKED, BRO. That's not Obama's fault, snowflake. Stop crying and STFU and do your damn JOB that you're overpaid for! Bitch!

If this is the way you are responding then you obviously didn't read what he wrote, or notice the way he wrote it. He's not a dick who says cunty things. He's an engineer who followed data to conclusion and presented it with sources. And he's not crying about it. People are ASKING him about it.

At-will in a state where firing him for political viewpoints is illegal, and in a country where his essay counts as whistleblowing (he's alleging Google engages in illegal practices) and where retaliatory action against whistleblowers is illegal. Google can't fire this guy after the incident / dispute, nor can they reassign him to nothingness, hold him back in his career, etc.

Exactly. His response shows why it is not reasonable to attempt to "educate" or "reform" these sorts of employees. If you have one, just fire them and reduce the damage. And when you're hiring, make sure you're not hiring one of these clowns.

Misogynists would make the same statement regarding women complaining of legitimately unfair treatment. Congrats, you're no better.

Except it has nothing to do with "at-will" work. In most States, it is required to take action to prevent what he did. (creating a hostile work environment based on categories prohibited from being used for workplace discrimination)

In fact, one of his arguments was that current socjus policies help foster hostile work environments because they don't reflect reality. Then there's the broken assumptions that come from using 'class' to judge individuals...

It is not a synonym for oppression. It has a narrow, clear meaning, and you're not allowed to do it at work based on a bunch of categories that you must be aware of to work with others.

We all discriminate every time we make decisions, based on all sorts of discriminators. The problems start when irrelevant ones are used to make assumptions. This is probably the crux of the problem with current social justice policies. Under the guise of fighting against irrational discrimination, it imposes it using the same flawed reasoning.

Claiming it is your opinion doesn't shield you at work; keep opinions on those subjects for your personal time, work at work and politic somewhere else.

Perhaps google should also fire its VP of 'diversity' so she can also follow this good advice and get a real job. Then the company can focus on building a culture of merit.

He filed an NLRB complaint, which is pretty serious. The state of California also has strong whistleblower protection laws, I imagine pushing forward with a complaint there would bolster his NLRB case.

IANAL but believe a sober analysis of his memo would be unfavorable for Google. The thing about courts is they are not mobs, the words there would be interpreted very differently.

- There is discrimination (presumably against men) resulting from Google's policies, or affirmative action which is illegal in California, and thus he is a whistleblower.

Wrong. He only has to show that he made the claims in good faith.An unsubstantiated claim grants immunity from retaliation for making the claim. The only exception is when you can show that the person made the claim in bad faith (being a liar vs. being incorrect).

I'm not even going to read the rest of your post because you're misinformed and incorrect from the start.

Unfortunately, he's not doing the smart thing here, which would be to stay the ever-loving-hell away from the media until the suit was complete. I, too, hope he brings those vindictive fuckers down, but he doesn't seem to be managing this the right way to make that happen.

Perhaps you didn't notice, but the site you linked lists companies and individuals holding a state contractor's license. These are entities that are licensed by the state to provide services to the public, and shouldn't be confused with companies that have contracts with the state.

I am actually wondering of Google were the ones to pick the perfect time for it. They are being attacked by the radical feminists on a "wage gap" that may or may not exist at Google. Google gets to first look like they side with them, and later on use any legal case against them from this wrongful termination as evidence that the other attacks on them are toxic and bogus.

You can make a simulation: generate a number of individuals with assigned skill scores, by a given distribution. Generate also a population B, with a same or similar distribution but a lower mean (or alternatively, same mean and lower variance, etc). Use any bell-curve distribution (such as normal) with no cap (so D&D-like 3d6 is out).

Now, pick N top scorers from the combined population. Compare the same with various kinds of racism:

only the "better" group A (exclusive traditional racism)

a bonus for group A (traditional racist preference)

a bonus for group B (affirmative action racism)

racial quotas

You'll see that any kind of racism hurts the person doing the discrimination as he gets an unoptimal result. You can also notice that affirmative action is drastically more harmful than traditional racism. Both are bad, though, and there's a big gain for being race- (and gender-, etc) blind.

When it comes to sex, you are somewhat incorrect. I work more in the hardware side, but the female engineers that I have known have been every bit as good as the men (some better than most men).

However, take your example, and have the two groups be the SAME in terms of skill, but group A is much more numerous than group B. In order to hire the same numbers of A and B, you need to lower the standards for B.

That is possibly what we have here. If you want equal numbers of males and females, but the males in

It is counterintuitive, but there's no or only a slight difference (depends on the distribution) between a group being less numerous, or having less skill.

We don't care about the mean, or the bulk of the population -- only about the tail end. And tail ends of distribution D(x) tend to be similar between D(x-a) vs D(x)/b -- for some distributions like exponential exactly equal, for some close enough to be hard to distinguish on real noisy data.

You're conflating assistance for low-scorers with picking the cream of the crop. A wheelchair-bound person is not going to win a running competition. Heck, he won't even win an endurance car race -- the first moment any routine maintenance needs to be done, he'll be stuck with a trivial malfunction that an able-bodied driver would fix in minutes.

As for a girls-only CS class, yes, it is discrimination. Gender doesn't make an individual worse, it may at most affect the average of a population. That is, ev

Part of this memo was a claim of illegal hiring practices (i.e. benefiting women because they were women and not merit). Part of it was illegal discrimination based on political views (protected in California and obviously meant to protect snowflake liberals who can always make a firing about their IDENTITY rather than their performance but it will be fun to use it against the creators in this case).

Part of it is grey-area discrimination that may not be "illegal" all on its own but when combined with the ab

It isn't. Google's employment practices were already public knowledge. But the whistleblowing law is broadly written and may still apply.

Personal opinion: Employment should be a mutually voluntary relationship, and in the absence of a contract saying otherwise, either party should be able to terminate it at will for almost any reason, or for no reason. This is not only morally correct, but it leads better economics, since easy to fire means easy to hire. Jurisdictions that overly protect employees from

So the first line has two references in it, and you say "backed by nothing". The last line again contains a reference. Discuss the references, don't pretend he's basing it on nothing.

The extraversion part has no references, true. But this is not a research paper - it is an internal memo that is more full of citations than I've ever seen in a memo. If you worked at Google, it would be totally reasonable to ask where the hell he got that part from (though to be honest I found it right away Googling for it).

I find it ironic, that conservatives, that have ranted and raved against any sort of labor protections and the NLRB, seem to be rejoicing at pushing a NLRB complaint.

If this is not an example of conservative white male privilege, I don't know what is.

I find it ironic that liberals rejoice when the science concerning global warming is settled, but rant and rave when science that doesn't fit their narrative is presented.http://quillette.com/2017/08/0... [quillette.com]

While both of those books accept that there is some biological element, they state that it is overblown and largely based on poor science. Results that are not reproducible, use too small sample sizes, inadequate controls and extravagant conclusions.

Were you hoping people wouldn't follow your links? Because one book has already been thoroughly discredited (see below) and the other doesn't actually support "all brains are alike".

The second one (wikipedia) is debunked in the very page you linked to by a few respectable journals, notably Biology of Sex Differences and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

In the page you link to a fairly prolific and respected scientist says this about the first book:

"strongest in exposing research conclusions that are closer to fiction than science...and weakest in failing to also point out differences that are supported by a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research."

There is a body of carefully conducted and well-replicated research for the assertions of the fired googler. The conclusions that are closer to fiction than to science are not any that he made.

If he doesn't, rest assured he can have a new career on the lecture circuit. He can call it Pick the real memo [crisismagazine.com] As for me, I think I want to look into starting a consulting company of engineers fired for non-engineering-related reasons.

He distributed it to executives asking for criticism. They ignored it. He posted it on an internal social media page asking for the same stuff.

It wasn't offensive, and scientists in these fields are backing him up. He offered more creative solutions to improve diversity efforts based on biological difference and evolutionary psychology. Google's efforts for diversity have been a $265 million dollar flop.

There was something on a linkdin profile or something that either claimed a PhD, or just studying for a PhD, which has since been removed. The profile change was made when someone called the school and found he had not completed a PhD, then published that.

That's the joy of science. You can think research is shit, then you get to disprove their assertion. If you _think_ it's shit, but can't disprove the science behind it, then it's valid. If you think it's shit and you _can_ disprove it, then it's objectively shit.
Would be interesting to see another PhD rebuttal to it in scientific terms, rather than the name calling and witch hunting.

There are things you just don't say or do, even if you think it's true.

Sometimes there are principles worth fighting for -- such as liberty and pursuit of the truth against evil and deception.

A great man once said "Give me liberty, or give me death," and then he died, but if he hadn't said those things,then we would all be slaves today; instead of a people with some freedoms, among the most important of those,the freedom of speech, and the ability to speak our minds without fear of being executed o

That's exactly how we got in this mess. That is EXACTLY how things got so PC that you can't even present well cited data in a logical manner any more if it could be (mis)construed to mean that anyone is "marginalized." And If anyone actually read it, they would know that the guy isn't anti women or anti diversity - quite the opposite actually. He's only a skeptic of the methodology which has lead to this exact situation. Because some things are too taboo to tal

He might well be right. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't have seen this coming.

He was certainly right - at least to whatever extent the science was right. The core of his memo was a survey of the current scientific literature, with citations. Of course, this stuff isn't physics, but it is repeatable measurements with known (if limited) predictive ability.

He's pretty young though, and a PhD, so I suspect he was quite naive. "Should have" seen it coming, sure, I agree, but understandable that he didn't. An engineer addressing an unknown by studying the science behind the problem, and using that as a basis to ask some obvious questions. Sort of what you want an engineer to do.

He might well be right. But that doesn't mean he shouldn't have seen this coming.

He was certainly right - at least to whatever extent the science was right. The core of his memo was a survey of the current scientific literature, with citations. Of course, this stuff isn't physics, but it is repeatable measurements with known (if limited) predictive ability.

He's pretty young though, and a PhD, so I suspect he was quite naive. "Should have" seen it coming, sure, I agree, but understandable that he didn't. An engineer addressing an unknown by studying the science behind the problem, and using that as a basis to ask some obvious questions. Sort of what you want an engineer to do.

Also important to remember that he was a computer scientist addressing the "science" behind an issue outside his area of expertise.

No, as far as public appearance goes, Google's best move would have been to never even acknowledged the essay. Let it leak, whatever. This thing has gotten 100x more news time because Google decided to respond to it instead of just let it die out.
I would assume that even internally, responding to this was still a mistake on Google's part. They basically took a guy who complained that Google didn't tolerate different ideological ideas, and fired him for having different ideological ideas. If you are a cons

His "assertions were abusive towards women" because the PC police and a lot of illiterate journalists looking for clickbait decided they were, NOT because of what he wrote.

What he wrote was about the fact that there are several ways to create jobs or revamp existing ones that would make them more appealing to a wider group of women which would in turn make Google more productive and an overall better place to work. While acknowledging that there is a wide overlap of traits and skills shared by both men and

Except he didn't state or even imply that anyone is "biologically unfit". All he said was that biology contributes a portion of the non-50/50 distribution of men and women in tech and high-level leadership roles. He even explicitly stated that everyone should be evaluated as individuals irrespective of their race or gender. And then went on to suggest some non-discriminatory ways to help improve diversity and reduce any unconscious/systemic bias against minorities.